The Talking Cure

...A dominant school of thought in today's academy seeks to extend "deliberative democracy" in all instances, articulated and advanced by such thinkers as the late John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas...

...Third, a politics that stresses rhetoric places an emphasis upon the faculty of judgment, and thus, in the language of Aristotle, in the development of phronesis, alternatively translated as "prudence" and "practical wisdom...

...Garsten ably explores the ground that animated the early modern exclusionary move toward "public reason" (a phrase first used by Hobbes and later reiterated by Kant...

...Restrictions on abortion, divorce on demand, gay marriage, or any other arguably debatable issues are regarded by contemporary "democrats" as beyond the pale of acceptable democratic discourse...

...In contrast to contemporary assumptions that ancient thought was a repository of antidemocratic elitism, Garsten shows how classical thinkers such as Aristotle and Cicero defended a politics of rhetoric and persuasion on both prudential and principled grounds...

...Rather than shrinking from widespread civic deliberation in the name of "public reason" predetermined by elites, Garsten rightly calls for today's citizens to "once again look directly at one another and speak directly to one another...

...Yet Garsten also rightly recognizes that, in a democracy, rhetoric is always likely to be employed in the effort to secure political advantage...

...Second, it assumes that the citizenry possesses a store of "common sense" that has its source in the shared life of a city...

...In a polity in which rhetoric is no longer derided, it might be expected that politics itself might come to be regarded as ennobling, and worthy of our shared devotion...

...As may be obvious, theorists of "public reason" favor courts and bureaucracies for the pursuit of the politics of "reasonableness...

...Note that neither silence nor shouting is commended in a politics of rhetoric, but, above all, speech to and among citizens...

...Today's academy, where inheritors of Rousseau, Kant, and Mill reign, is the locus of defenses of more extensive democracy—in John Dewey's words, a belief that the cures for the problems of democracy lie always in more democracy...

...Public reason" became the measure of what "reasonable people" would agree to if they actually thought reasonably about a particular issue...

...Beneath heated contemporary debates over judicial activism and top-down bureaucratic uniformity lie a deep set of philosophical debates about the nature of democracy itself, debates that Garsten ably traces and clarifies...

...Harboring fears of a democratic citizenry, they seek out political venues that can arrive at "reasonable" decisions in the name of the people but are, in fact, likely to be least influenced by the people...

...The politics of rhetoric is a politics of patience...

...Today's democrats are, all too often, highly self-satisfied in their felt sense of intellectual superiority to previous thinkers who expressed concerns about democracy, yet often even more restrictive about who is permitted full democratic access than those previous thinkers they excoriate...

...According to these ancient sources, a politics based upon persuasion assumes that people begin with different stances but that, through a thorough exploration of an issue by a series of well-trained orators, some portion of the citizenry can be led to change their initial view, and the polity can set a course with the support of a considerable majority of that citizenry...

...In the face of Protestant preachers appealing to the individual conscience of members of their flocks, and the fears of widespread division that would result from each person following his or her own belief in what the word of God demanded in the current conflicts, thinkers like Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant each appealed to a form of "public reason" as a standard that would garner greater social conformity to the pronouncements of one sovereign...

...Unreasonable arguments include any that appeal to religious grounds...

...Such thinkers rejected the Patrick J. Deneen, the Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis associate professor of government, and founding director of the Tocqueville Forum at Georgetown is the author, most recently, of Democratic Faith...

...Modern academic democrats offer extensive and elaborate criteria for what arguments and reasons can be admitted into political discourse...

...namely, those fears held by early modern thinkers that arose over religious divisions marking the Reformation...

...Aristotle, if apparently more sympathetic to democracy, begins by excluding broad swaths of people from citizenship, including slaves, women, and "vulgar mechanics"—blue-collar workers, in a manner of speaking...

...One size does not fit all: Political circumstances will always demand reflection and judgment of a citizenry that is itself educated by and through oratory...

...Putting aside cant (if not Kant), clear-eyed thinkers cannot avoid noticing that the apparent contemporary confidence in democracy, in fact, masks a deep and pervasive mistrust toward broad swaths of the citizenry which might, in an open democratic setting, introduce to the public square what modern "deliberative democrats" regard as "unreasonable" arguments...

...So the story goes, and students are rarely advised that the evidence may not fit the narrative...

...Contemporary thinkers have long been aware that the roots of contemporary versions of "deliberative democracy" lie in the philosophical reflections of thinkers ranging from Thomas Hobbes to Immanuel Kant...

...Political decisions are best reached politically—through the give and take of political debate and discourse—rather than by the imposition of a standard of "public reason" predetermined by intellectual elites...

...Plato, for one, viewed democracy as a form of mob rule and urged, instead, governance by specially-trained philosopher-kings who had superhuman abilities to discern and apply the solutions for the problems of cities...

...In the beginning were the Greek philosophers who, while subtle and profound, nevertheless at the end of the day were unreconstructed elitists...

...Designating acceptable arguments as ones that clear the bar of "public reason," today's most ardent democratic thinkers seek to ensure that a mechanism is in place to prevent the inclusion of arguments—or citizens who make them—that might question the basic liberal orthodoxies of the day...

...and, essentially, any arguments that would limit the contemporary assumption that "democracy" means thoroughgoing individual autonomy...

...As the story continues, the Greek view held sway for much of human history, essentially until the Enlightenment and the rise of a kind of "democratic faith" expressed by such thinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and, at times, John Stuart Mill...

...Finally, a politics of rhetoric assumes that citizens can and ought to be moved by an appeal beyond narrow self-interest and can be persuaded that the common good may and can justify changing one's mind in light of one's interest more broadly conceived...

...A politics of rhetoric and persuasion favors legislatures and more local public venues of the sort Alexis de Tocqueville extolled in his tour of America...

...We have come a long way from the cramped ancient view, now having achieved an enlightened rejection of elitism and an embrace of democratic egalitarianism and supreme confidence in the democratic capacities of the people...

...If contemporary suspicion of manipulative rhetoric would seem to be justified, that is perhaps because one gets the rhetoric that one expects...

...The conclusions demanded by "public reason" were thus invoked in the name of the people, as being those decisions the people would reach hypothetically under optimal philosophic circumstances...

...But Garsten's story is even richer, and more revealing, than those studies that recognize the animating fears of these thinkers (fears that explain the contemporary resurgence of interest in "public reason" in the wake of the widely acknowledged demise of the "secularization thesis...

...A politics based upon extensive use of rhetoric thus contains several assumptions that are categorically rejected by theories of "public reason...

...dour Greek view of human capacity for rational self-rule and increasingly endorsed democracy as not only practicable, but the only justifiable form of political organization...

...A democratic polity that does not give rhetoric some pride of place—including an education in rhetoric, not only of orators, but of those citizens who will more often be listening than practicing oratory—leaves the field largely open to the manipulators and demagogues...

...Bryan Garsten, currently an assistant professor of political theory at Yale, has masterfully documented the origins of this modern mistrust of the masses and the rise of exclusionary procedural liberalism in Saving Persuasion...

...By the time you account for all the excluded classes of people in Aristotle's "democracy," what's left of the citizenry looks increasingly like Plato's elites...

...arguments that can be deemed to be based upon unreasoned prejudice, such as those based upon tradition or custom...

...He does not ignore the legitimate fears of classical and contemporary critics of political rhetoric: Opening a significant sphere for the employment of political rhetoric always invites the possibility of manipulation and dema-goguery...

...Indeed, the thoroughgoing victory of this viewpoint goes a long way in explaining the pejorative understanding with which most people today regard the very word "rhetoric...

...For Garsten further recognizes that the form of discourse that was rejected by early modern proponents of public reason was not unreason, but rather, persuasion based upon classical rhetoric...

...If occasionally expressing reservations about democracy, such thinkers nevertheless inaugurated an era marked by growing belief in the moral progress of humanity from brute existence to increasing refinement and even "perfectibility...

...Public reason thus maintained the patina of democratic legitimacy, even as it justified extensive and even absolute rule by, alternatively, Hobbes's Leviathan, Rousseau's Legislator, and Kant's "enlightened ruler" whose advisers consisted of—yes, little surprise—the professoriate...

...First, it holds that no argument should be prejudged to be out of bounds: Even those arguments that, according to some, appear to be "unreasonable" might, in fact, have a basis in the shared reality of a polity and prove justified according to the shared reasons of a polity...

...Such a view argues for the acknowledgment of the legitimacy of opinion and tradition, and against the often-hurried imposition of pure theories upon an imperfect polity...

...As our enlightenment has continued, we rejected not only the ancient pessimism about democracy, but even the residual reservations about democracy of the early modern period, and have now reached an age in which democracy is universally recognized as the only justifiable form of government...

...Persuasion and rhetoric were explicitly the object of attack and derision by thinkers ranging from Hobbes to Kant, and remain regarded with deep and abiding suspicion by contemporary liberal thinkers who associate rhetoric with the unreasonable manipulation of people's emotions, fears, and prejudices...

...Through this predefinition of what constitutes "reasonable" arguments, such thinkers ensure that there will be very little disagreement among pre-screened "deliberative" citizens...